Tips

Since Gpredict is fully GNU autotools compliant and does not require any options to be specified, we can build using CDBS.

Using CDBS for Ubuntu packages is very easy, if the software you are packaging can be configured and built using the GNU autoconf tools (the "configure-make-make install" idiom). After adding cdbs to the Build-Depends in debian/control, a basic debian/rules file using CDBS can fit in 2 lines. For a simple C/C++ application with no extra rules, such as hello, debian/rules can look like this:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk

That is all you need to build the program! CDBS handles installing and cleaning. You can then use the .install and .info files to tune your package with the usual debhelper functions in the various sections for debian/rules.

Result

Following the video tutorial steps I managed to create both the source (required for the PPA) and a binary .deb.

The binary was created using pbuilder. Before pbuilder is useful it has to be set up:

sudo pbuilder create

Moreover, since goocanvas is in universe it has to be enabled, otherwise it will not be able to resolve the dependency: